A Modest Proposal

Why don't Usenet conversations live as long as Web documents? It's an accident of history. But the Internet's evolution could create a new role for tried-and-true NNTP technologies.

Bookmark a Web document and, most likely, it will still be there a month later. Bookmark a Usenet article, though, and most likely it will have expired in a month. Why this asymmetry? NNTP's roots go deeper than HTTP's--back to when newsgroup replication was the only way to ensure reliable access to conversational data from all points on the Internet, including intermittently connected nodes.

Times change. Now Web sites routinely offer unique collections of documents, perhaps mirrore d to a few other sites, but more often not because a single site can be available to nearly the whole Internet. So the question arises: Why flood the Internet with redundant Usenet data? Like many other Internet service providers, both of the local New Hampshire outfits I use carry relatively full newsfeeds. How many of these ISPs' customers are really active in the likes of, say, comp.theory.cell-automata? Few or none. But the newsgroups t hese folks do join churn so quickly--to make room for the next batch of mostly unread data--that members who don't tune in almost daily miss much of the action. The Usenet is a swiftly flowing river and, as Heraclites observed, you can't step into the same river twice.

Or can you? Imagine another Internet where collections of related documentary and conversational data live side by side, each collection on its site (or small group of mirror sites). The cell automata theorists, for example, run one site in Europe (mirrored to the U.S. and Asia), which hosts both the documents and the discussions these researchers create. Likewise the snowboarders, the knitters, and the foot fetishists. Members of these groups can refer to other groups' sites where, as on their own sites, documents and discussions are carefully preserved and interwoven.

Who will decide which of several rival snowboarding organizations gets to be the official site? There doesn't have to be one official site. If snowboarding discussions concentrate on several, or even several dozen, sites, then tens of thousands of sites don't have to carry this material. Multiplying this effect by the 10,000+ newsgroups extant on the Usenet today yields a massive reduction of network traffic. The quality of discourse within each group can improve. Today there's little incentive for participants to weave a rich fabric of discussion because the medium is too ephemeral. But if discussions live for months rather than days, they can grow and deepen in ways that aren't possible now.